Excerpts

Preface The Swiss Alps dominated the landscape. The mountains didn't know it was 1945, or that the world was at war. Those snow-capped heights were likewise disinterested in the drama playing out far below. On a winding mountain road, a sports car skidded around tight switchbacks, the driver, whose story this is, fighting to keep the vehicle from plunging into the distant valley below. Not far behind, another car, in hot pursuit and gaining. The driver of the first car was an international icon, a tennis great who had won the sport's most important title, the Wimbledon championship, six years before, the last time the tournament was played before World War II interfered. She was also a four-time US National champion and had accumulated every accolade worth having in the prewar era of sports. She was renowned for her oratory, her singing voice, her appearance, her style, her closeness with the elite of Hollywood and Wall Street, and her optimistic, winning personality. She had become espe- cially famous after coming back from two years away from the sport, stricken down by disease in what had seemed the prime of her career, only to fight her way back to the top. She was just about the last person anyone would expect to be driving for her life down a European mountain, protecting evidence of Nazi war crimes on the seat beside her, squinting into the inky blackness, afraid to slow down even if it meant a fiery death. Soon the other car forced her to stop. There was a confrontation. The precious evidence she had stolen a short time earlier, the reason she claimed to have come to the mountains in the first place, was taken from her by force. Alice turned and ran, her breath ragged in the high elevation. A shot rang out. A blow to the back, a burning sensation, and then, nothing. What in the world was she doing there? For that matter, was she really there at all? Alice Marble was the foremost female tennis player in the years before World War II. As the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum wrote about her in its Pocket History of Champions , "Women's tennis can be put into two eras--before Alice Marble and after. She created the women's game in its aggressive, modern style." Hardly a contemporary match report or profile was written about Alice that failed to note that she "played like a man"--that is, her ferocious serve-and-volley style and powerhouse élan were so overwhelming that only her occasional lack of control could stop her. Using her next-level athleticism and an unreturnable serve, Alice swept to eighteen victories in what today would be called "Grand Slam" events, the US Nationals and Wimbledon (she never played the big tournaments in France or Australia, for monetary reasons). That number includes multiple women's and mixed doubles titles, all but one in the five-year window between 1936 and 1940. Then the war forced Alice into quite different activities. She was an outsize figure during this time, "Alice Marvel," the "Garbo of Tennis Courts," the "blonde bombshell of her day." She caused a stir by playing in shorts, rather than the skirts then in favor. The press was quick to remind their readers that "her legs are like two columns of polished mahogany, bare to the knees, her figure perfect," as one dazzled reporter wrote. "Miss Marble looks lovely even when she has just come off the court," thought the well-known English writer Charles Graves, in a typical description that focused on Alice's physical presence. "Few girls can do that. On the court itself you see how beautifully built she is. She walks like a prizefighter." But Alice was just as famous for the times when she was looking and feeling far from her best. A series of illnesses led to a collapse on the historic red clay of Roland-Garros stadium in Paris, which culminated  in a diagnosis of tuberculosis that seemed to swerve her budding career into an abutment. Sidelined and committed to a sanitorium, she was forgotten for nearly two years, until a dramatic comeback lifted her to the very top. Her revival to capture victory at the 1936 US National Championships lifted Alice to new heights of popularity, at one stage receiving roughly five hundred fan letters a day from admirers who asked her for health tips, relationship advice, or her hand in marriage. Her combination of on-court excellence and off-court style had her greatly in demand and opened up many doors. She was a regular on radio programs, as an interviewee, as a guest host, and as a singer, where her contralto voice won enough plaudits that she was asked to sing at posh nightclubs in New York and London. Her writing ability was outstanding, especially for someone who gave up a college education for the courts. She contributed pieces to newspapers and magazines with great frequency, and even was part of the original writing staff for the Wonder Woman comic book. She developed a speech based on her "will to win" and relentlessly toured the country to deliver it. Her eye for fashion and love of sporting it led to a side career as a designer of athletic outfits as well as clothes made for everyday use. A natural athlete such as women's tennis had never seen, Alice had risen from humble beginnings in San Francisco to conquer the sport of royalty. Her father passed away when she was still a child, and the family lived on the edge of poverty thereafter She found solace in sport. As a teen, Alice was known throughout the city for her baseball ability, as well as her regular gig shagging fly balls as an unofficial mascot of the San Francisco Seals, the best local nine in the time before the major leagues moved west. Upon discovering tennis, Alice found a home among the municipal players at the courts in Golden Gate Park. Years later, a London Times writer surveying Alice's career would note that the "rough-and-ready apprenticeship stood her in good stead when she came to meet more artificially trained players." Tennis was a sport for the idle rich, the country club set, the people who could compete without the bother of earning a living at the game, for it was strictly amateur in that era. Alice didn't fit that description in any way, but her hardscrabble beginnings served her well when she started moving up in the rankings. She was the top-rated player in California before she turned seventeen and was competing for the US National title (the forerunner to today's US Open) on her eighteenth birthday. She traveled east in 1931 for the first time to play the swells of the sport at its highest level. She fared poorly but came away convinced a top coach would help her reach the pinnacle. She found that coach in Eleanor "Teach" Tennant, one of the most colorful and successful, if overlooked, figures in tennis history. She, too, had willed her way out of the anonymity of the poor San Francisco streets, becoming the foremost teacher of the game in Southern California, with a clientele stuffed with famous film actors and actresses, the top names of the day--Gable, Flynn, Dietrich, Lombard. It was that last one, Carole Lombard, the "Queen of the Screwball Comedy," who hung Eleanor's nickname on her. Lombard was a serious player, though when Tennant instructed her to attack the ball higher or get in better position, she would respond with a sarcastically sweet, "Yes, Teacher dear." After enough of those, Lombard shortened it to "Teach," and the nickname stuck. Eleanor was "Teach" Tennant after that. Alice and Eleanor got together and formed one of the most successful coach-student relationships ever seen in individual sports. Their closeness went beyond the typical athlete-coach model--far beyond it. Eleanor essentially adopted Alice and took over her life for more than a decade. The pair lived together, dined together, traveled together. Eleanor took over Alice's finances, fashioned her diet and training regimen, controlled her social life. In that time Alice captured the very highest honors tennis had to offer. Through Eleanor, Alice was introduced to worlds closed to ordinary tennis players. She hobnobbed with Tennant's acting pals, counting Lombard and her husband, Clark Gable, among her close friends. She was a regular guest at the American Xanadu known as San Simeon, William Randolph Hearst's Palace on the Pacific. Despite her humble roots, Alice was a favorite of wealthy families on either coast and was especially close with Will du Pont, heir to the Delaware chemical and munitions firm. Alice had a long and enigmatic relationship with Du Pont, not unlike her one with Tennant. Because of her success, Alice gave herself freely to Eleanor's vision. Alice called her "my adopted mother" in the London Daily Mail , just as Eleanor called Alice her "foster daughter." Another writer referred to Eleanor as Alice's "psychiatrist," noting "she is particularly frank with her criticism of Miss Marble." For as long as they were inseparable, the pair were dogged with rumors of a romantic relationship. Neither ever confirmed such an affair, hardly surprising given the times they lived in. Homosexuality, after a brief flash of acceptance in the 1920s, was driven firmly underground by an ensuing backlash. Being openly gay or bisexual, or even "straight with a wink," à la Cole Porter, for example, would have surely damaged Alice's budding and then flourishing career, rife as it was with opportunities off the court. Even with the passing of the years, and the acknowledgment of af- fairs and crushes on other women, Alice insisted that she and Eleanor were not lovers--in the physical sense, anyway. They were certainly in love in a more spiritual manner, and when their relationship ended along with Alice's career, blunted at the height of her power by WWII, the breakup was shocking, given how intertwined the two women had been for over a decade. But the specifics of Alice's relationships with Tennant and Du Pont pale in comparison with other, even more dramatic (some would say "cinematic") liaisons she claimed to have. Alice maintained she got married during the war, to an army air force officer whose death would lead Alice to agree to take on a wartime espionage mission to search out another of her lovers, a man whom she never publicly named and who was in cahoots, or worse, with the Nazis. It was that relationship, and the revenge she sought for her dead husband, that supposedly put Alice on that mountain road, in a car chase that ended with her taking a bullet in the back.Alice revealed these adventures only in her second memoir, Courting Danger , published a year after her death in 1990. She was mostly taken at her word, though attempts to independently confirm her story have always led to dead ends, and challenges to the truth of her story showed up in book reviews and other projects left uncompleted. I am merely the latest in a long line of Alice Marble admirers. It was always easy to appreciate her at an inch-deep level, but as I learned more about her, going further and further down the rabbit hole (how appropriate my subject's name was "Alice"), the mysteries of her life only deepened. In writing this book I have crisscrossed the United States and scoured international archives in an attempt to chip away at the mystery of Alice's contradictions, how such a public life could remain so shrouded in shadow. I have visited the touchstone sites of her childhood and career. I have followed every trail, every lead--some of which, more than I hoped, ended in further question marks. There are new stories here and old ones with new twists. I've examined faded correspondence and pieces of paper Alice herself touched, recordings she made, articles she wrote, and records she likely never expected would be looked for. And I made contact with the few remaining people who knew her, hoping they could provide some insight into the Marble Mystery. At the end of the detective work remained a unique, pioneering, fascinating woman, which I suppose I knew was the case even before I went digging around into her life. Alice Marble may be mysterious, but she doesn't disappoint. Chapter One High Sierra Alice Marble began her life far from the Swiss Alps, in the shadow of different mountains, ones that, for a brief, sparkling period, were the center of the world. The Sierra Nevada range forms the border between Nevada and northeastern California. While the range may not soar toward the heavens quite as spectacularly as the Alps, or stretch quite as far, they are every bit as beautiful. The area is replete with vistas and valleys and astonishing sights, like the Half Dome or El Capitan in what is now Yosemite National Park, or Lake Tahoe, the largest of the multitude of high-altitude bodies of water in the region, or the sequoia trees that tower in timeless majesty over the slopes. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, the thousands upon thousands of people who swarmed the area cast their gaze downward. For it was the gravel in the foothills and beneath trickling streams that caught the eye. There, ribbons of gold shimmered amid the gray rock. And the whole world, or so it seemed, had flocked to the Sierra to pry it from the earth. In January 1848, a man named James Marshall, a carpenter originally from New Jersey, was building a sawmill owned by John Sutter when he spotted flakes of gold in the shallows of the American River, where he was working. It was a major strike, and days later, the treaty ending the Mexican-American War officially handed the territory of California to America. In an instant, a bull's-eye was painted on the Sierra range. By June, three-quarters of the men in San Francisco had left the city for the mountains, seeking their fortune. The following year, 1849, saw a massive invasion of the area by gold hunters from around the country (and the world). By the end of the year the non-native population of California had grown from around eight hundred in March of 1848 to an incredible one hundred thousand. And the influx of newcomers never stopped. Two of them were Alice's grandparents. Alice's paternal grandfather, Solomon Marble, was born in a small town in central Maine called Shirley. He married another Pine Tree Stater, Sarah Frances Hewins, nearly two years older, who was from a venerable, tiny village near Bangor called Old Town. According to Alice's first memoir, The Road to Wimbledon, published in 1946, Solomon left Maine as a teenage boy, sailing on a trading ship through the Panama Canal before taking a "jolting stagecoach to the coast" and then another ship to San Francisco. He then made his way northeast, in the direction of Sutter's Mill. It isn't known for sure if Hewins was with him for every leg, or exactly where they got hitched-some sources have them marrying in Maine in November 1858, others say the nuptials took place in California. Mines were being sunk all over the area, and Solomon did his best to find a fortune-making vein. He and Sarah bounced around the Sierra Valley, seeking gold in several camps and settlements, including the propitiously named Gold Run. The lucky strike never did come for Solomon. But in all that moving he couldn't help noticing how fertile the valley was for farming and grazing. So he turned to life on the land, setting up a sheep farm in a small settlement called Holland Flat (since renamed Dutch Flat), just west of the huge wilderness now preserved as Tahoe National Forest. Here, the Marbles raised their family. Alice's father, Harry Briggs Marble, was born on May 4, 1866, in Holland Flat, having been preceded by two older brothers, Heckton and Melvin (a third brother, Eugene, was born three years later). After the children had grown a bit, the Marbles left the farm at Holland Flat for a mining camp called Long Bar along the Yuba River, where they were living when visited by the local census taker in 1880. Exactly why Solomon gave up the first farm is not known, but his son would have a similar hot and cold relationship with the farmer's life. Indeed, the adult Harry at first was desperate for more adventure than the staid life of planting and shearing. He did the expected thing, seeking the color, moving around the watersheds of the Yuba and Bear Rivers and, especially, the Feather River. But he wasn't any luckier in mining for gold than his father had been, so he soon turned his attention to logging. Beginning with the gold rush, the Sierra Valley became a "logging epicenter," to the point that today there is virtually no virgin timberland remaining. Wood was desperately needed for housing all the gold rushers and for building transport to and from and especially down into the mines. Clearing the old-growth forests of towering sequoias and coast Douglas firs and ponderosa pines became a major industry virtually overnight. Harry rushed to join in and wound up in a particularly important and difficult job, that of the high climber (often referred to as the "high rigger"). Spending weeks at a time under the immense emerald canopy, he would don spiked climbing shoes and a heavy climbing belt and, using nothing but strength, balance, and somewhat insane courage, scale the trees. The lumber from smaller trees was considered less desirable by local builders, so the loggers targeted the biggest trees that blanketed the southern slopes. Harry's daily work site was up to two hundred feet in the air. Once atop the green beast, Harry would lean back against the belt, attach ropes to the tree, and begin to saw away at the branches and the thick trunks. "As it begins to sway and crack," Alice wrote in The Road to Wimbledon, "he calls a warning to the logging crew at the base of the tree. With a surging sound like the sea, the treetop falls, crashing its way to earth. The high-climber sways with the lashing, vibrating shaft, keeping his balance by a sixth sense and the grace of God." The casualty rate among loggers was absurdly high. Danger came from above, as crashing trees wiped out entire work crews, and below, with mudslides and hidden ravines causing equipment- and lumber-laden men to plummet to their deaths. Transporting the immense logs via ox-pulled wagons was also a treacherous process. Men were killed or lost limbs to out-of-control timber or beasts at regular intervals. Harry had made good money in the forests, much more than he ever made looking for gold, but in the 1890s he quit the timber business for, surprisingly enough, the same farming life his father had struggled with. Unlike his father, Harry raised cattle instead of sheep. He started in a place called Sierraville, then spent some time prior to the century's turn in a small settlement in Plumas County called Kettle, named for the family that founded the camp, in the spot they happened to hop off the stagecoach and put a shovel into the ground. Harry was a tall, strong man, a classic "husky pioneer," in Alice's description, with broad shoulders and brown hair that climbed farther up his forehead with the passing years. But even out of the tall trees, Harry discovered life in the Sierra was unforgiving. Once, a horse he was shoeing kicked him and nearly cleaved off his kneecap, and in 1898 he caught a fever severe enough to lay him up for most of the spring. While healthy he helped erect barns and build roads, and occasionally he headed back into the forest to hew timber from the giants that grew along the local slopes, all of which kept him out of debt when the beef market was slow. When times were good, he made the rail journey to San Francisco to sell his stock. As a rancher Harry was dependent on good grazing conditions and plentiful water, and the climate in Kettle turned against him (forcing the settlement to be abandoned), so he picked out a spot about six miles northwest, a speck on the map called Beckwith (now known as Beckwourth), roughly fifty miles from his birthplace of Holland Flat. In the summer of 1904 he "report[ed] business in that part of the county to be reasonably lively," so it made sense to get closer to the action. He cleared a spot in the old growth, near a hot spring that reeked of sulfur, and began building a house, one that was far too large for just one man. The local paper, the Feather River Bulletin, took notice. "Harry Marble of Kettle, is building a comfortable dwelling house for himself. Looks very suspicious, Harry!" Indeed, it was a house built for a family. Not long before, Harry had journeyed to San Francisco to sell some of his cattle, as well as to get his troublesome asthma checked. He went to a renowned throat doctor named George Gere. Alas, the doctor was out for lunch, he was informed by the nurse, but perhaps he would like to wait? He sure would, for Harry was quite taken with the nurse. Her name was Jessie Birdsal Wood, and it turned out she was Dr. Gere's sister-in-law (he was married to Jessie's sister Josephine). Jessie was born in Oakland in 1877, but her family moved across the bay to San Francisco in time for grammar school. She was a graduate of the Hearst School, blessed with a lovely singing voice to go with a large oval face and wide, deep eyes so blue they were nearly cobalt. Harry hung around the office for several hours making nervous conversation and, after getting his exam, stayed in the city for far longer than he had planned. He learned that Jessie was a thwarted singer, limited to the church choir as her family didn't think much of their daughter hanging around clubs late at night to sing. She had a beau, a younger man who had a good business in the city. She lived with her sister Jo and the doctor in Haight-Ashbury, and for the next few weeks Jessie juggled her two suitors, at length finding herself falling for the tall timber from the northeast. Harry proposed immediately, and Jessie said yes. They married in San Francisco on December 22, 1905, at Jo and Dr. Gere's place. "The bride was in white satin," reported the San Francisco Call, and "two little flower girls completed the bridal train." Harry told the paper he was taking his new bride back to Plumas County, "where he owns a pretty home on his large stock ranch." They were considerably older than the typical betrothal age of the time-he was thirty-nine; she was twenty-eight. It was a leap for Jessie to leave the city she had known all her life to follow her man into the wilderness. Unlike the Bay Area, the Sierra Valley had true winter, with heavy blizzards and deep snowdrifts that often cut the farm off from the outside world. While Jessie had to look up at the soaring peaks of the mountain range that dominated the horizon, she was certainly no longer at sea level-Beckwith sat at nearly five thousand feet, a mile high where the air is thin and breathing difficult for the unacclimated. Of course, the area had its charms, dazzlingly beautiful in a different way than San Francisco's steep allure. Harry had planted apple orchards on his acreage, which towered over the verdant grass meadows that dappled in the summer sun and blew with the breezes year-round. From the farmhouse, a "rambling white house with a wide veranda around all four sides," according to Alice, the Marbles could look out on an incredible view, the landscape either emerald green or brilliant white, depending on the season, dotted with animals and trees, the sunlight reflected by the nearby Big Grizzly Creek and the Middle Fork of the Feather River. It was also a lot quieter than the big city-a lot quieter than many small ones, for that matter. Their nearest neighbor was four miles down the road. The town of Beckwith was a single thoroughfare with a handful of shops. The nearest "large" town, Quincy, a mining community of several hundred people that was the Plumas County seat, was nearly forty miles away, a long, uncomfortable journey at the best of times. When Jessie made it to Quincy, it was noted in the Feather River Bulletin-on the front page! The farm, called Hathaway Ranch, was on Sattley Road, little more than a lumber trail that branched off from a larger one called Loyalton Road. Both were roads that Harry helped build, which accounted for his knowledge of the area. The work, for Beckwith Road District construction crews, earned him two separate payments of around a hundred dollars. The Marbles were rather progressive for the period; Jessie was one of just sixteen women in Beckwith Precinct to register to vote in the 1912 elections, while Harry lent his name to many social causes, including the establishment of a unified school district that would encompass Plumas and Sierra Counties. In the meantime, a family burgeoned. Jessie gave birth to a pair of sons, Dan in 1907 and George a year later. The family added its first girl, named Hazel for her eyes, in March 1910. Alice Irene Marble was the fourth child to come along, born six years after Dan and three post-Hazel, on September 28, 1913. "I must have been a healthy, well-cared for scrap of humanity," Alice wrote in The Road to Wimbledon, "but not a spoiled baby." On December 1, 1916, the family would add one more child, Harry Jr., whom everyone immediately and thereafter called Tim, who would look up to Alice his entire life. His birth was noted in local newspapers like the Plumas Independent, though they only mentioned gender, not Tim's name. "The home of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Marble of this valley is brightened by a new boy, born December 1st," read the Feather River Bulletin. Unlike many elements of her life, Alice's birth went unrecorded by the press. ¥  ¥  ¥ A golden voice trilled across the ranch house. Jessie Marble worked hard, preparing meals for her family and the half dozen farmhands who worked on the land. She also kept house and made clothes on a "rickety sewing machine [that] clattered and banged and jammed and stuck," in Alice's memory. All through the day, Jessie would sing as she toiled, hymns and religious songs in the main. She would pass along her industrious energy to her daughter, along with her lovely singing voice. A photo taken of Alice at age two displays a startlingly prescient glimpse of the adult to come-wide, alert eyes, relaxed before the camera, an inviting smile on her face. There is no trace of baby fat or features that altered with time. One glimpse at the photo and the future Alice Marble, internationally known as she was, is clearly visible. Excerpted from The Divine Miss Marble: A Life of Tennis, Fame, and Mystery by Robert Weintraub All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.